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At the River

One night that summer my mother decided it was time to tell me aboutwhat she referred to as pleasure, though you could see she feltsome sort of unease about this ceremony, which she tried to cover upby first taking my hand, as though somebody in the family had just died—she went on holding my hand as she made her speechwhich was more like a speech about mechanical engineering than a conversation about pleasure. In her other hand she had a book from which, apparently, she’d taken the main facts.She did the same thing with the others, my two brothers and sister,and the book was always the same book, dark blue, though we each got our own copy.

There was a line drawing on the cover showing a man and woman holding hands but standing fairly far apart, like people on two sides of a dirt road.

Obviously, she and my father did not have a language for what they did which, from what I could judge, wasn’t pleasure. At the same time, whatever holds human beings together could hardly resemble those cool black-and-white diagrams, which suggested, among other things, that you could only achieve pleasure with a person of the opposite sex,so you didn’t get two sockets, say, and no plug.

School wasn’t in session. I went back to my room and shut the door and my mother went into the kitchen where my father was pouring glasses of wine for himself and his invisible guest who—surprise—doesn’t appear. No, it’s just my father and his friend the Holy Ghost partying the night away until the bottle runs out, after which my father continues sitting at the table with an open book in front of him.

Tactfully, so as not to embarrass the Spirit, my father handled all the glasses, first his own, then the other, back and forth like every other night.

By then, I was out of the house. It was summer; my friends used to meet at the river.The whole thing seemed a grave embarrassment although the truth was that, except for the boys, maybe we didn’t understand mechanics. The boys had the key right in front of them, in their hands if they wanted, and many of them said they’d already used it, though once one boy said this, the others said it too, and of course people had older brothers and sisters.

We sat at the edge of the river discussing parents in general and sex in particular. And a lot of information got shared, and of course the subject was unfailingly interesting. I showed people my book, Ideal Marriage—we all had a good laugh over it. One night a boy brought a bottle of wine and we passed it around for a while.

More and more that summer we understood that something was going to happen to us that would change us. And the group, all of us who used to meet this way, the group would shatter, like a shell that falls away so the bird can emerge. Only of course it would be two birds emerging, pairs of birds.

We sat in the reeds at the edge of the riverthrowing small stones. When the stones hit, you could see the stars multiply for a second, little explosions of light flashing and going out. There was a boy I was beginning to like, not to speak to but to watch. I liked to sit behind him to study the back of his neck.

And after a while we’d all get up together and walk back through the dark to the village. Above the field, the sky was clear, stars everywhere, like in the river, though these were the real stars, even the dead ones were real.

But the ones in the river—they were like having some idea that explodes suddenly into a thousand ideas,not real, maybe, but somehow more lifelike.

When I got home, my mother was asleep, my father was still at the table, reading his book. And I said, Did your friend go away? And he looked at me intently for a while, then he said, Your mother and I used to drink a glass of wine together after dinner.